William Chyr | Gravity Direction Gizmo

Given that I’m making a game that involves switching between multiple gravity fields, you’d think it’d be pretty useful to know which gravity is in which direction in the editor view.

For a long time, I’d basically have to hit play and walk around inside the scene, in order to figure out which gravity is pointing which way. Having the cubes in the scene helped, as I could then derive the direction from their arrows.

It wasn’t a massive problem, but definitely a minor annoyance that came up now and then.

Anyway, I finally got around to putting it on our trello board that I needed a gizmo to tell the gravity direction.

Chris started working on it this morning.

At first the gizmo’s size depended on the camera zoom in iso view (worked fine in perspective), so when I was working at the zoomed out level I normally work at, I could barely see the gizmo:

gizmo

(it’s a tiny speck in the bottom right corner).

I needed to be zoomed in this much to see it:

zoom

Chris then fixed the size and made it constant in size regardless of zoom, but there was still this clipping issue when zoomed out, which didn’t seem easily fixable:

gizmo clip

At this point, we were looking at the default Unity axis gizmo. I remembered at some point I was playing around with changing the colors of the axes in the preference menu.

And then it occurred to me, that instead of writing a new custom gizmo, we could just change the colors in the preference menu, and use that to determine the gravity colors.

It only shows 3 colors, but since I know the colors very well by opposites (blue vs red, green vs yellow, purple vs orange), it lets me figure out the gravity direction very easily.

The bonus is that when I select an object, the axes for moving the object are correctly colored as well: gizmo xyz